Considering Battleship's been out less than a week on the international markets and already made $60 million, I don't think it will flop. It might make its money back by the time it opens in Canada and the US.

For anything requiring a large initial investment, traditionally government has to pave the way, even if it's backing the handful of visionaries with the original ideas. The private sector only gets involved once it's established there's something viable they can make money on. That's how it worked with modern…

So what? There have always been the short-thinking masses. And to be fair, most of them don't have the luxury to be forward-thinking. But forward-thinking people have managed to develop or discover despite their existence before and will again. It only takes a few to drag everyone else with them.

I remember going through most of this as an indie/alternative music fan in early 90s—who was also into thrash metal, goth-industrial, and techno. Eventually, I realized the time I waste hating things I don't like, I could spend on finding more things I do like. But that epiphany did take a while.

Re: your takes on #7 and #3. Good points. For me the worrisome part is the reaction of the bankrollers. With typical beancounter logic, they're going to (and already are) greenlight similar projects to Transformers and Twilight hoping to make as much profit as those series did. And the horrible thing is they might be…

Yes there was: [www.yojoe.com]

How often do you see a fiction author who isn't already an established bestseller (e.g. Stephen King, J. K. Rowling) get interviewed on television? Publishers' marketing budgets are spent promoting bestsellers that will already sell, celebrity bios and political agenda books, not their midlist authors.

If a company like Amazon gains a near-monopoly on the distribution of books, they could become the Diamond of book publishing.

Exactly. I think the [spill.com] crew put it best when they said, "after 45 minutes this movie rolls over and falls asleep."

Robert Rodriguez has been saying this for years. "You will run into problems, and when you do, you can either throw money at them or you can be creative." (I'm probably paraphrasing.)

I don't know that I've ever seen an urban combat scene handled so well as in Children of Men. And that includes Black Hawk Down, Enemy at the Gates and Stalingrad.

It's weird how eugenics shows up among the ancient Spartans and in Plato's Republic (probably inspired by the Spartans), and then almost disappears for over 2,000 years.

Why do you think a eugenics program would have to be undertaken by the state? Why couldn't a corporation or cabal of wealthy individuals accomplish it with willing volunteers?

I can still recite McQueen's speech to the chaplain verbatim.

In the first Aliens vs. Predator movie, Lance Henriksen played Charles Bishop Weyland, the CEO of Weyland Industries. Xenopedia, the (I'm certain non-canonical) Aliens vs. Predator wiki, claims Peter Weyland is Karl/Charles' son, but that smacks of fanon retconning to me.

I can't like this comment enough.

The last barrier to space colonization will be removed if this works. Godspeed!

The plot moves along a lot faster in A Song of Ice and Fire than it did in the Harry Potter books. If they take seven years to tell the whole story Bran and Arya's actors will have left puberty far behind by the end of the series.

Does everyone know the story that the Gith races were created by Charles Stross, and named after a race he read about in an old George R. R. Martin novel? I think I loved them even more after I found that out.

Never been a big fan of the drow, either. They were clearly set up as the Villain Sue race, able to challenge PCs of any level without giving them piles of unbalancing loot. And frankly, Salvatore's take on them turned me off even as he seemed to get everyone else to love them. But like a lot of you guys, I was never…